To the editors:
That leads me to my central argument: Dean’s assumption of simplistic literalism in blues lyrics is patronizing to the point of borderline racism (as are her references to the “violent roots” of the culture that spawned the blues–that culture was shaped by religious, spiritual, and liberational impulses far more than by any indigenous predisposition toward violence). The blues is an art form of great subtlety and craftsmanship; irony and ambiguity are at the heart of much blues expression. Yet people still stereotype the blues as nothing more than a primal utterance from the dark midnight of the soul, spontaneous and unrefined, with no meaning beyond the naked truth of the words and the primitive emotionalism of the music.
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Many blues operate on that level: the violence the lyrics portend is a metaphoric violence of the soul, a representation of a shattered and desperate inner self lashing out against a world of oppression and alienation. The object of the singer’s paranoia–a lover, an unnamed demon as in Buddy Guy’s version of Little Brother Montgomery’s “First Time I Met the Blues,” the entire civilized world in Julia Moody’s “Mad Mama’s Blues”–is metaphoric; it stands both for a repressive society that breaks promises and dishonors faith at every opportunity and as a manifestation of an existential sense of tragic reversal, a hard-won knowledge that life’s most sacred covenants will probably be broken and redemption may lie only in the individual’s ability to shake his or her fist in defiance.
David Whiteis
